Minecraft Creator Stops By Pirate Bay Co-Founder's Reddit AMA To Thank Him For 'Making The World A Better Place'

from the reddit:-making-the-impossibly-cool-seem-almost-commonplace dept

A recent Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything, for the .005% of readers who aren't aware) featuring Peter Sunde, co-founder of the Pirate Bay, had a visitor drop by to pay his respects... and nearly derail the whole thing.

Do you think the sales that you've made through pirate versions are worth the number of downloads? I know I bought the real Minecraft after testing it out via. pirate software, as I do with most worthwhile software.

This is an extremely interesting question. For a game like Minecraft, I definitely believe it's at least broken even because the game has quite a long lifespan and has viral aspects in that people enjoy sharing what they create in and with the game. More users means more talking about the game, which means more sales.

For other games, I think piracy can definitely negatively affect the total number of units sold. This is especially true for hollywood style big story heavy big productions that are only expected to sell well and stay in the public conscience for a few months. That still doesn't mean anyone has actually LOST any money, as a bad review also can affect the total number of sales, and hopefully nobody thinks it would be sane to sue magazines for "loss of profit" over bad reviews.

As Notch states, no one's suing magazines for bad reviews... yet. And that day may never come, especially if a convenient scapegoat like "piracy" can be asked to shoulder the blame for lousy sales. As for the statement about per-user cost, Notch is referring to ProjectZomboid, which was taken down, not because of piracy itself, but because of a glitch in the program that downloaded the entire game from Zomboid's cloud server any time the player clicked the "Update Now" button, racking up bandwidth charges for the developers. Unlike a torrent, where the delivery cost is footed by every user, Zomboid was footing the bill for bandwidth on its own. Not your usual "taken down because of rampant piracy" situation.

I strongly believe individual rights are much more important than corporate rights, and I consider piracy to be an extremely minor offense. It's less harmful than jaywalking.

Organized and business run copyright infringement where people try to make money of someone else's work is a problem, but people sharing stuff casually is just barely even worth talking about...

This is the part that is often overlooked when the usual suspects begin decrying piracy. They choose to conflate it with counterfeit goods, child pornography, drug trafficking, terrorism... whatever it takes to make individual, non-commercial file sharing look like criminal behavior.

Thousands of individuals sharing stuff they like adds up. But attempts to place this behavior in the same basket as commercial enterprises that sell pirated content just make the person doing the basket-loading look ridiculous. As Notch says, casual file sharing is "barely worth talking about." This sort of behavior has gone on since the day of cassettes (for music and software) and isn't going away anytime soon.

By taking a more pragmatic approach to infringement, creators may find that an entity like The Pirate Bay isn't the enemy -- or at least, not the only one or even the worst one. Attacking The Pirate Bay also attacks its users, and its users are people you want on your side, not fighting against you. Notch sees both the upside and downside of free (and uncompensated) distribution and his solution has been to craft something that people want to pay for, even after they've already picked it up for free. Part of that profitable equation is an awesome product. The other part is simply being awesome -- something that's much easier to do when you're not painting potential customers as freeloading pirates.

Reader Comments

Nostalgia

Is it just me or does anyone else recognize that game companies that depend on copyright issue have a lot of issues with their community?

We talked about EA and how they threw the public under the bus when it came to DRM. But there is more to this that Notch made me recognize.

EA has destroyed every instance of community building they could have.

Let's explain:

The DRM? Leaves the modding community in the dust. Less people want to play a game in a closed wall. Most pirates will opt to remove the DRM but not build on the experiences that EA tries to offer by making new tools.

The Origin system? Leaves out the millions of people on Steam who rely on just Steam for their games. It also separates their market to allow them to price discriminate. Why try to pay a game on Steam for $60 when EA offers the same game on Origin for $40 and (again) the pirates just remove the incentives by offering a better alternative than the official corporate version?

Of course, Ubisoft makes the same mistakes. It seems that when you're in charge of a company, you see the public as merely consumers while you look to make all of the rules to your advantage.

The point is maybe it's time to recognize that the ones that hide behind copyright the most are the same companies (whether in music, gaming, or movies) that are the most vulnerable to disruption.

Re: MPAA / RIAA / Gaming Companies Are you listening?

I am no gamer. I don't play games at all. I was intrigued by Minecraft and I downloaded it. Then I PAID for it.

I am a gamer, and I hate how much time I have sinked into Minecraft (which was bought and paid for.) If Notch built a paid version to run on Android that could connect to a craftbukkit server, I'd be in a whole new hell, as all of my 'crafting is on a bukkit server. I'd pay the fee in a heart-beat.

Between that, the Torchlight series, and all the GoG games I've purchased, I don't have any time to play any Ubisoft games, and my purchases on Steam have dried up. Of course, I am sure Ubisoft is swearing right now that because I am not buying their stuff, I am pirating it. But the truth is, they haven't made anything to compare to what I buy on GoG, Torchlight or Minecraft to waste my time on.

Re: Re: MPAA / RIAA / Gaming Companies Are you listening?

I am a gamer, and I hate how much time I have sinked into Minecraft

Let me rephrase that...I don't hate Minecraft, I love it almost to an addiction. If I have an hour to burn, I don't play Minecraft because I know that if I sit down on Minecraft, three hours will go by before I realize that my hour is up. I can blow a whole day on Minecraft and not even feel it. And I'd gladly pay for Minecraft again, if Majong put out a version that allowed me to play via my cell-phone on a craftbukkit server (which the current version of Android Minecraft cannot do.)

I've actually had to set an alarm clock before sitting down with Minecraft, because otherwise I'd become so immersed in the game I'd lose track of time.

Re:

Been playing Minecraft since the Alpha days, saw the great Game, Community, and transparency Notch/Mojang had built around this game and the whole buy now, and we'll make sure you get your money's worth.

Because the cost of entry was so cheap at the time, I bought gift codes for all my friends and gamer family members, and we continue to play to this day. It's been great fun.

Anyone who would pirate Minecraft at it's ridiculously low price is never going to buy it anyway, but I guarantee you they'll tell all their friends about it, and some will buy it, and some will pirate it.

My initial buy in for $10 has far surpassed the value of 99% of the AAA titles I've purchased.

Re:

I still don't get the popularity of Minecraft.

It's a good concept but lacks content. Stuff that should be there to make the game interesting isn't. Development is slow as hell and could be much quicker if Notch invested a few hundred thousand bucks in the game. So much for supporting a game and company by buying their product...

Lastly it's mostly the modders who make the game worthwhile. And yet Mojang refuse to make the modders' work easier - the modding API was promised a year ago and still doesn't exist.

So really, I get that the concept is interesting, I like it too, but the moment you take the fanboy goggles off you realize the content just isn't there.

Re: Re:

Minecraft is this generation's Lego's, with the ever so tiny difference that you only pay once, and you're brick/block collection is infinite, allowing you to build anything you can think of.

As anyone who has played with Lego's can tell you, while building what's shown on the box is entertaining, the real fun comes when you start building things you think of, which is something Minecraft is excellent at: providing you the basic tools and letting you build whatever you can imagine, hence the popularity.

I had heard about Minecraft for a while, and finally decided to pick it up right around New Year's. I was instantly hooked on it and still devote hours at a time to it.

You have to admire the guy; Minecraft is the classic success-from-humble-beginnings story, and it's hard not to have warm feelings about that. But that's only part of the picture.

In my opinion, the main thing that Notch and co. did right was being "open, human, and awesome", to use a classic Techdirt saying. Simply being indie helped a lot here, and gave the developers opportunities to "connect with fans", as Mike puts it, that they would not otherwise have had. Face it: We would never have seen Minecraft from a mainstream studio, for various reasons.

When I think of mainstream games, I think of faceless corporations consisting mainly of equally faceless, uncreative businessmen. With them, I see any monetary transaction as mere red tape, an inconvenient formality, a means to the end of me being able to play the game. With indie games like Minecraft, however, especially when the developers are as transparent as Mojang has been (no mainstream game studio I know of has ever released weekly development builds), I actually see the people behind the product, and this alone makes me feel good about having helped contribute to their sduccess and continued productivity.

Yes, part of this stance is Notch's laissez-faire attitude toward piracy. I fully agree that trying to crush piracy with DRM is a waste of time and money that could be spent actually making the product better, and in fact will more often than not will directly lead to more piracy, not less. While Minecraft does have a simple login-verification system, it causes almost no inconveniences in actual gameplay.

Finally, there is the fact that Mojang encourages, or at least tolerates, mods to the game, and other such things which in the US at least, and in my non-lawyerly opinion, would be considered infringing "derivative works". While most mainstream game companies often prohibit such things with opaque, lengthy EULAs, Mojang only asks one thing: "Do not distribute.", while being cool with everything else. A thriving mod community is one of the things that have given Minecraft so much value as a game, and quite a few features of Minecraft (including the level file format!), which were originally mods, would not have seen the light of day without one.

So yeah, the lesson we should learn from the story of Minecraft is that transparency and tolerance go a long way.

Free Minecraft Accounts

Have you tried FPOs? http://zeketiki.wix.com/fpos
They have a working minecraft account generator and a Battlefield 4 beta code generator. You guys should really check it out. It helped me a ton, I'm now playing minecraft with all my friends :)

Markus Persson is a marketing genius. He actually made a tweet to "just pirate it" if you can't afford it. People can play Minecraft for free on cracked servers just by downloading a torrent from TPB. Its like a sample of the real thing and gets so many people hooked that they end up buying the game. If he took extraordinary measures like many gaming companies to impede piracy, I doubt Markus would have as much respect and revenue as he does now.